[lit-ideas] Re: Stand Close to Me
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:17:15 +0900
Andy, I actually agree with about 80% of what you say here.
On 1/29/07, Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maturity comes from a sense of safety in childhood. Children who don't feel
safe (are beaten, abused in any form, including and especially sexually) who
are scared all the time, cannot grow up emotionally. They become frozen at the
time of the trauma, whatever the age. Their bodies grow and their cognitive
ability grows, but emotionally they're stuck at the age of the trauma, even if
it's passive trauma.
This is likely but not inevitable. When my daughter was a toddler, we
were living in New Haven, CT, where my wife was a graduate student at
Yale. An anthropologist as well as a dad, I talked about this issue
with some folks at the Yale Medical School. I was told that doctors
are continually amazed by kids at the tales of the normal
distribution: those who grow up in great environments and turn out
rotten anyway and those who grow up golden in lousy environments.
It also speaks to the fact that we don't have a choice of who we fall in love
with, because when we fall in love we're simply recreating the conflicts we
grew up with. None of us realizes we have a conflict until we hit a crisis
point. That's why crisis is good, because it shakes people out of the
doldrums. Al Gore uses this concept in his movie on global warming when he has
the cartoon frog heating up in a beaker of water. The frog will just sit there
until the water is hot enough that it jumps out.
I haven't yet seen the movie; but the usual image of the frog in the
beaker is that the water slowly gets warmer until the frog, who hasn't
noticed what's going on, is cooked, i.e., dead.
The bottom line is, maturity comes out of a sense of safety in childhood, and
there is precious little safety for children out there. It's bad enough here
in the U.S. Just imagine what it's like for those poor kids in Iraq or
Palestine or South America with their never ending revolutions or in Africa,
that was originally ripped to shreds by Europe. And now we want to traumatize
even more people by invading Iran. We need to be spreading peace, not war,
helping societies improve. Instead our mature war mongering selves only want
to beat everything into submission.
Can't help asking: Is this why you keep pounding away, insisting that
we all accept your view of things?
> Think Mrs. Robinson.
Ah, Mrs. Robinson. Very attractive that one. But among my adolescent
fantasies, Emma Peel remains supreme.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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